Bo Xilai is the displaced Chinese Communist leader who keeps giving. And in an indirect way he may be opening up China in ways that will be hard for the Communist Party to completely shutdown as 500 million bloggers and the Chinese equivalents of Twitter and Facebook plus the thousands of microsblogs continue to make startling revelations of what exactly has happened in the Middle Kingdom this early year.
The word that is filtering out is that Bo may have been up to more than covering up his wife’s dragonian misdeeds. Now the runours are of a coup attempt. The whole problem is that China has a long history of emperors with succession being a a very dicey affair more often than just the Three Kingdoms period. The Wall Street Journal is covering how the Internet Spigot keeps delivering ever more juicy tidbits on the Bo Affair. But also the story shows how hard the Party is cracking down on the Internet scene. There are echoes of Tienamen Square as freedom of expression that marked that era has started to percolate through among 500million Internet users and their micro-blogs. The problem for the party is that the Internet is very, very popular – and the micros-blogs present moving targets. So cracking down may prove to be very difficult and/or very provocative as inflation and wage disparity become major issues.
Takethe5th promised legs to this story .. but was not expecting Big Bo athlete legs.